Sixes Wild: Manifest Destiny (28 page)

“You never do.” She laughs.

I don’t. My guts are in a twist. “Care to change that?”

She brushes a paw along my muzzle, very soft, and gives me an apologetic look. “I don’t put up fences, I just ride ‘em. This is just the way of the world right now.”

I want to call her on that, but she’s kissing me again. Turns out that’s the straight route for shutting me up. I can smell her, the scent stronger than I remember. Makes me soft in the knees, and the reverse elsewhere. In fact, the only other time I caught this much of her scent was when we’d just crawled out of the rapids and cuddled up...

I stop the kissing again. “You’re in heat.”

Blushing, she replies by nibbling along the underside of my muzzle.

Protests wither on my tongue. She’s in my wings again. It might only be for a day, might only be for tonight, though that doesn’t matter to me. In this moment, I can’t conceive of her being anywhere but here, anything but mine.

I don’t know what to make of this hare, but I do know one thing: whether she’s here or gone, I’ll never get much sleep at night.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The development process for Sixes Wild: Manifest Destiny started shortly after I’d published “Code Drop” in Sofawolf Press’s Heat anthology. They asked if I’d be interested in writing a novel for them and I jumped on the idea—even as a kid, I’d dreamed of being a published author.

Early on, we’d decided that it should probably have a romantic theme, because I’m sappy enough to be really good at that. The specifics of the novel, or even its genre, were tougher to pin down. I’d been developing a few different fantasy and sci-fi settings over the years, but all were projects mired in layers of re-writing. I even toyed with the idea of writing a Victorian-Era detective novel, though that turned out to be gay fiction and, as the Blotch so wisely pointed out to me upon our first meeting, why would Sofawolf have bothered to finally find a straight novelist if I was just going to write more male-male romance?

By this time, it’s worth noting, I’d already started to be recognized at furry conventions such as Midwest Furfest and Anthrocon as “that cowboy at the Sofawolf table.”

Finally, a breakthrough arrived in the form of a conversation with Sofawolf CEO Jeff Eddy. The details of it have faded from my memory, but the following is at least as interesting as the original.

Tempo: “So I’m thinking of writing this sci-fi piece…”

Jeff: “We could do that, sure, but how will we pitch that? What does a cowboy know about sci-fi?”

Tempo: “What, so I should just write a furry western?”

Jeff: “You could.”

Tempo: “We don’t even publish westerns.”

Jeff: “We could.”

Tempo:”I suppose I should just make it about a fruit bat sheriff, and call it ‘Long Tongue of the Law’?”

Jeff: “That’s great! Except the title is horrible. We can change that after you write it.”

Thinking this was some sort of joke, I quickly penned a short story by that title. The response was more or less as follows:

Tempo: “Well, here’s that story.”

Jeff: “I like it. Can’t wait to see it in novel form.”

The rest is fuzzy alternate history.

The Process

I wrote most of the novel in WriteRoom, which is a wonderful little word processor that blacks out the entire screen and just shows you words in green. I’ve used it for years and it’s amazing. This was the first project where I adopted Scrivener, which was designed from the ground up as a novelist’s project-management tool. That’s tech-talk for the closest thing you’ll get to software that builds a novel for you. It’s like a wiki, personal assistant, and the useful parts of Microsoft Word all rolled into one elegant whole.

Usually, I wrote in WriteRoom, then pasted into Scrivener, though when I found myself writing in Scrivener for extended periods, I used an app called Nocturne to invert the screen colors and turn it monochrome. If this seems like overkill, it’s worth keeping in mind that my eyes are usually the first thing to get tired after a half-dozen hours of writing. I strongly encourage anyone who’s serious about writing to look into these apps, especially Scrivener (which is now even available on Windows).

To write Sixes, I stampeded from beginning to end until I had a draft. Then I inflicted this draft on as many hapless friends as I could until they pointed out things they didn’t understand or wanted to see more of. It went from about 30,000 words to about 60,000 by the time it hit print.

In my current projects, I’m trying to do a more modular project setup: building the bare-bones minimum of the story with as few scenes as I could get away with, then plugging in more and more scenes. While I do believe in the “everything should advance the plot” theory, these scenes are the fat that makes it delicious.

The Art

The illustrations for the novel and the comic book started at the same time, in the hands of Shinigamigirl and Sidian, who were the artists respectively. The three of us kept in communication to make sure we’d have a consistent look for the series. The cover for the novel took the longest of any single piece for this project, but I have to say it was well worth the wait. Sofawolf and I considered some other poses, including Six holding some poker cards, but in the end we decided Shinigamigirl’s simpler profile design was more elegant. I consider the finished piece to be one of the finest images ever to grace a novel and myself to be the most unbiased judge of such things. The internals entailed less deliberation, once Alopex (esteemed editorial fox) and Jeff helped pin down which scenes we’d be using. My favorite is currently a tie between Six and Blake nude in bed or Six reunited with her father for a fleeting instant.

Oh, and while we’re talking about the cover, Ursa Award winner Kyell Gold helped me write the back text.

The comic presented a unique challenge for Sidian and myself. Neither of us had worked on a comic in any serious way before, nor had we read many graphic novels. After a crash course in the medium, we settled on a simple, classic style that fit well with the basic comics of the book’s era. The viewing angle changes only slightly, text at the bottom provides additional context, and the speech bubbles don’t stand out as much as the typical white ones would have. I did the placement of the text, which meant being very choosy with what dialog needed to be in the story, so as not to block the pictures she’d worked for months on. Actually, his wasn’t the first comic script I’d written. During my internship with Sofawolf Press, they had me write an original story in this format. We’ll see if that sees print in some form in the future.

Due the POV switches between four different characters, it was tough for readers of the first drafts to keep track of who had point of view. My aunt Barb pointed out to me that the Wheel of Time series had far more than 4 characters to follow, but overcame this by including icons at the beginning of each chapter. These woodblock-style icons represent who has point-of-view in a particular chapter. So, I scrambled to get ahold of Yuki-chi, who was then able to finish four very elegant woodblocks in time for the layout. An interesting bit of trivia: the originals for these are massive—about 5000 pixels per inch at the size they’re printed. Most high-end printed illustrations run at about 300 ppi.

Blake

Physiologically, Blake was a challenge. Not only had I not written bats before, they’re rather rare in furry literature. So I took pains to make sure he acted like a bat: hanging upside-down whenever possible, flying whenever it helped, and having to be careful since he’s not the most sturdy of creatures.

Sidian helped a lot with the wing design: two fingers, two wing-fingers, and a thumb. She, Shinigamigirl, and I all adopted this model as soon as we started the comic, which was about halfway through the editing process. I usually call Blake’s fingers “wing thumbs” rather than calling them “fingers” because the latter term makes it feel like he has full-fledged hands.

Shooting guns with three fingers hurts, by the way. I tracked down two friends, a history buff and a Chinese-Philosophy major, who owned the Colt Peacemaker and S&W Model 3 that Six and Blake use. Turns out Stephen King knew what he was talking about when his Gunslinger lost two fingers and had real trouble firing a gun properly—normally the ring and pinky finger absorb a lot of the kick from a pistol, so having them out of the equation makes the damn thing try to fly out off like a pinched lawbat.

So Blake fires guns with his feet. This choice drove poor Sidian up the wall a bit, since she is not used to drawing people shooting guns with their feet. No idea why.

For a while, I had concerns about Blake’s echolocation. He’s a hybrid fruit bat and human-size, so I had no idea if either of those would have impacted his abilities. Turns out I didn’t need to worry. A guy named Daniel Kish has been blind most of his life, but learned to echolocate by clicking his tongue. He’s apparently taught several hundred other blind people how to do the same.

Also, due to logistics, Blake apparently eats a lot of canned fruit. I assume even the restrained sheriff goes a bit overboard on the fresh fruit when he can get his wings on it.

Six

One concept that didn’t make it into the final novel was The Moon Bunny. The idea was that each race sees something different in the craters on the moon, so the hares see a bunny stirring a cauldron or pot of medicine. This was dropped because it didn’t really tie in anywhere.

The model of Colt Six carries doesn’t seem to have been very common in the 1890s, but I really wanted her to have the shorter “gunfighter” barrel lengths. Not only does this have the practical advantage of being faster to draw, it (along with the silver plate and engraving) gives her guns a look historical gun experts refer to as “badass.”